Variants
Perhaps it helps to imagine those recently discovered variants of lightning that appear between sky and space along the upper reaches of thunderheads: red sprites, mushrooming elves, electric (smoke) rings clutching at the sinkhole of space.
Perhaps it helps to imagine the small sparks of current between the cell walls, bunching up into the endoplasmic reticulum, congealing in the ribosome; those tight nuggets of life until, swarming like killer bees, certain charges cohere, gather heat, and then — well, then there is nothing but raw resistance and flame. Perhaps it is simply useful to remind oneself that there are still unseen mysteries at hand.
Square Dancing
Even when he was president of Mear Paper, riding shotgun in his modified Checker with its chrome sideboards, wet bar, and flashy leather backseats, he’d order his chauffeur to stop at the VFW hall so he could watch the Friday square dance called by Burt Michigan Wolverine, whose barking voice created intricate patterns as partners linked arms and rotated in that effortless yet demanding tension when there is just enough lust (and love) between pairs to make their temporary partings seem lonely and tragic until their reunifications at the end.
Potentially Related Strange Phenomena
Barns catching fire — on hot summer afternoons — out of the blue and for no apparent reason; a person disappearing in the dead of night, leaving only a pile of blankets on the bed and an ash-stenciled outline of his or her last sleeping formation; war hoots along the border of Kansas; the lonely, dim-throated voice of Riding Thunder, or Kit Carson, seeping into the radio static.
Additional Theories: The Spiral Notebook
Word was McGee had a fascination with the idea of the spiral notebook, and even claimed that he had invented the product himself. He expressed admiration for the curl of wire embracing the punched holes, drawing the pages into a tight alliance. One old-timer remembers seeing him in the break room during his electrician days, fiddling with wire, twisting it around a dowel. Only through stubborn will is it possible to fit his obsession with the spiral notebook into the manner in which he died that evening at the lake, and in doing so one has to turn to a grand theory that includes the ideas of symmetry and of the spiral in relation to the stress — and heat and friction — certain bond papers produce when a sheet is torn away. But that is a stretch.
Additional Theories: Dynamite
In order to make room for the proposed civic center, a crew came up from Chicago and examined the Delvic’s structure and set packets of explosives in strategic spots and wired them all together. There was something hopeful in their bright orange hard hats and the casual manner with which they handled the deadly materials. They spent an inordinate amount of time locating and packing the mythic main beam — that singular elemental piece of iron that acted as the crux for the entire superstructure. They stood in the street with surveying tripods and figured the angles and odds and estimated the rate of fall and the potential width of the dust ball that would come out of the mass like a giant furry beast. The fat ornate facade of the hotel — which had at one time lent the town an optimistic sense of grandeur and hope, with its curly cues of rococo molding and Louis Sullivan — inspired terra-cotta, and its gargoyles froglike and malformed, hunched in the top corners and visible only at twilight when the sun spread across the heavens — stood even after the blast, while the skeletal innards slid down in slow motion, the way a warm wedding cake might melt (all this transpiring in a few seconds of dust-bloom wonder); but if you looked closely — people say, people who were there — you could see the facade heaving, radiating hairline fractures as it struggled against its forthcoming demise. Other onlookers swear they didn’t see a thing.
Gloria
Some say McGee was in the audience on Bronson Street, sitting in the bleachers with the rest of the crowd, when the signal was given and the wired packets exploded and the building held still for a dignified moment, emitting small puffs of smoke. Some town folk claim that Gloria waved to him — her hand, in a white glove, mistaken for one of the many pigeons leaving their roosts at the last moment. She had hidden herself in a storage closet, amid galvanized buckets and the stagnant smell of wet mop heads and pink floor soap, emerging into the empty hallway only when the building was silent and the evacuation team was gone. (Common assumption is that she hid herself away with the expectation that McGee would stop the explosions and rescue her; others say she was mentally ill and paranoid and couldn’t imagine herself living anywhere else. Most agree that McGee thought she was safely out of the building.)
The fire marshal says that when they dynamited the Donavon Hotel in Chicago — previous home to an assortment of vagabonds and junkies, a remnant of the great flophouse culture of the Depression — they found the bodies of three men dressed in old tuxedos and the top hats of industrialists, with cigars still clenched in their teeth and cards in their hands. One, he says, had a pretty good hand, a full house, and seemed to be smiling, as if in that final moment of brain spark he had found deep pleasure not only in the good luck of his draw but also in meeting a benevolent grace-giving God who could at once provide justice and allow the persistence of deeper mysteries, the things that went beyond perhaps even His (God’s) own wide providence during yet another troubled period in American history. (See “The Great Depression,” above.)
The Botch
The idea is to tap into the old traditions, guns waving, eyes behind balaclavas — just one more bank heist breaking the tedium of an Ohio afternoon, leaving nothing but bewilderment, the kind you’d expect from corn-fed farm folks, one or two Mennonites, along with the requisite towheaded kid in overalls, his shoulders slumped from hauling seed bags; maybe a mother, one of those dry-mouth screamers, unleashing a dog-whistle cry (From a face begging to be pistol-whipped, Carson cut in) with that lonely look that comes from long, empty hours mashing up vegetables and boiling bottles on the stove, spoonfeeding the baby in a house amid the dead fields. She’ll go from that dog-whistle scream to cold fear to a kind of longing in a matter of a minute, gathering hope from the barrel of a gun, that dark rictus behind which the bore grooves lie ready to spin a bullet to a perfect stability, until it arrives to release her from the obligations of her life, so to speak. The idea being that her life, seeing that gun, hearing the shouts, for a startling moment will become strangely meaningful. Idea is to stand coolly, legs apart for balance, moving the gun from the farm-boy kid to the farm wife to the Old Order Mennonite, slowly enough to offer each of them a chance to have the aforementioned sensation, Donnie explained, pausing for a moment to suck on his cigar, glancing around our hideout, an old blacksmith shed about twenty miles outside Gallipolis, nothing inside but an old forge, stone cold, with taut, dried-out bellows, a few rickety chairs, an old table nicked and scarred from years of horseshoe pounding, and a dusty window giving a view of the road and a field of dead corn. Idea is to know ahead of time — because it’s pretty much preordained — that the security codger will be sitting on a stool near the front door, ready to put up some kind of fight, Donnie said, slapping the forge with the side of his palm, leaning down to gaze out the window while we stood around and waited for him to continue.